Aurora Australis over the elevated station at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica. Credit: Calee Allen, National Science Foundation
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I just had to share this gorgeous image of the Aurora Australis over the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. “Northerners” like myself occasionally get to see the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, but fewer people get to the the Aurora Australis because so few people live in Antarctica during the austral winter. In both hemispheres however, the cause of these eerie light shows is the same: the solar wind passing through the Earth’s upper atmosphere. This image was taken in May of 2008, but was just recently posted by the National Science Foundation.
The Amundsen-Scott Station has been open for just a year, and below are more pictures and information.
Amundson-Scott Station. Credit: Keith Vanderlinde, National Science Foundation
Stars are visible in this image, also taken in May of 2008, during the short daytime in the winter at the South Pole. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station sits at the Earth’s axis, atop a constantly shifting continental ice sheet nearly two miles thick. This is perhaps the world’s most remote research facility,
In January 2008, the National Science Foundation (NSF) dedicated the new station at the Pole, the third since 1956. The new station is larger and much more sophisticated than any previous structure built at the Pole. Research in a range of areas, from astrophysics to seismology, takes place at the station. The new elevated station contains dorm rooms, laboratories, office space, cafeteria and recreational facilities.
If you’d like to keep an eye on what’s going at the Station, there is a live web-cam that updates every 20 seconds.
The nominations are in, the votes have been counted and the Universe Today writers have been consulted; the Top 10 Scientific Endeavours of 2008 are decided! After much consideration by the readers of the Universe Today, it became quickly apparent what the popular choice would be, and some of the Top 10 may not come as a surprise. However, there are some nominations we weren’t expecting, and certainly cannot be found on any other “Top 10” list. Therefore, I believe the Universe Today’s Top 10 Scientific Endeavours of 2008 is the most comprehensive list out there, combining the votes of our readers, nominating a huge variety of articles available through one of the biggest space news websites on the Web.
Without further ado, here is the Universe Today’s definitive Top 10 Scientific Endeavours of 2008…
10. Chandra X-ray Observatory
Chandra X-ray image of M84 (NASA/CXC/MPE/A.Finoguenov et al.); Radio (NSF/NRAO/VLA/ESO/R.A.Laing et al); Optical (SDSS)Launched on July 23rd 1999, NASA’s Chandra X-Ray observatory has opened our eyes to the X-ray Universe. Chandra was named in honour of the late Indian-American Nobel laureate, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Subrahmanyan was known to the world as Chandra (which also means “moon” or “luminous” in Sanskrit) and he was regarded as one of the most influential astrophysicists of the 20th Century. It is fitting that one of the most influential X-ray observatories of the start of the 21st Century should bear his name.
In short, Chandra is an astounding mission, continuing to shape our understanding of known X-ray phenomena, providing us with a glimpse at the answers to some of the most puzzling questions of our time. Certainly one of the “Great Observatories”.
9. Epsilon Eridani This artist's conception shows the closest known planetary system to our own, called Epsilon Eridani. Credit: NASA/JPL/CaltechThe star system of Epsilon Eridani has provided astronomers with a tantalizing look into past of our very own Solar System since 2000. Being the ninth closest star to our Sun, it is also fairly easy to observe. At approximately 850 million years old, it is effectively what our system will have looked like when it was young; scattered disks of asteroids and dust, with exoplanets orbiting the star. Astronomers have even half-jokingly formed the link between Star Trek‘s fictional world of “Vulcan” with one of the large exoplanets known to be shaping one of the asteroid belts.
In 2008, further work has been done analysing the structure of the Epsilon Eridani system and there is even more evidence to suggest the star system is the Solar System’s “twin”. Although the star itself is slightly smaller and cooler than the Sun, it does possess several unseen planets, creating an asteroid belt much like ours, plus an outer belt (analogous to our Kuiper Belt, but 20-times bigger). Regardless of the similarities between the Solar System and Epsilon Eridani, it is a phenomenal achievement to probe an alien star system, over 10 light years away, with such precision.
8. Galaxy Zoo’s discovery of Hanny’s Voorwerp A highly scientific illustration of the Voorwerp (Galaxy Zoo)In Dutch, “Voorwerp” means “object” and this “object” was discovered by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel last year using the Galaxy Zoo project. Since then, this strange astronomical entity has captivated enthusiasts and professionals alike. In May, astronomers came a step closer to understanding what this object was, as Bill Keel explains:
“Our working hypothesis is that Hanny’s Voorwerp consists of dust and gas (maybe from a tidally disrupted dwarf galaxy) which is illuminated by a quasar outburst within IC 2497, an outburst which has faded dramatically within the last 100,000 years.”
Galaxy Zoo is a superb example on how enthusiasts can use an Internet-based system to observe and identify objects in the cosmos. I am sure Hanny’s Voorwerp will continue to captivate professionals and amateurs, ensuring Galaxy Zoo’s popularity through 2009 and beyond…
7. MESSENGER The MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury (NASA)The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft was launched by NASA in 2004 to begin an epic journey deep into the Solar System. Its eventual target would take it on a speedy roller-coaster ride via a series of Earth, Venus and Mercury flybys to slow its descent into the Sun’s extreme gravitational well. It won’t achieve orbital insertion until March 2011.
In January 2008, MESSENGER performed its first Mercury flyby. This is the first time for 30 years that the smallest planet* in the Solar System has been visited by a space mission (since the 1975 Mariner 10 mission flyby). There will be one more Mercury flyby until MESSENGER’s delta-v (change in velocity) has been slowed significantly to allow the spacecraft to be captured by the planet’s gravitational pull. During the January flyby, MESSENGER managed to capture some stunning images of the planet from an altitude of 200km. Then, in October the spacecraft made its second pass over Mercury’s surface from the same distance, revealing even more detail of the cratered, rocky surface.
After 3 decades, the mysterious planet, famous for being the closest planet to the Sun, is gradually revealing its secrets.
*Of course, when MESSENGER was launched, it was travelling to the second smallest planet in the Solar System. As Pluto was demoted in 2006, Mercury is now the smallest planet, whereas Pluto is a “dwarf planet” or a “Plutoid”.
6. First exploding supernova observed First supernova caught in the act (Alicia Soderberg, Princeton University)In January, something very special happened to a group of astronomers using NASA’s Swift X-ray satellite to study data from a month-old supernova remnant in a distant galaxy. In a case of “extreme serendipity”, the same galaxy produced another supernova the astronomers were able study right as it happened. This was the first time ever that astronomers caught a supernova in the act, we usually have to make do with studying the debris (or “remnant”) after a supernova has occurred.
“It’s a really lucky chain of events — a surprise,” said Alicia Soderberg, who is leading the group studying data from the explosion. “It was all over in a matter of minutes.”
This discovery is critical to understanding the science behind the final moments of a massive stars life, improving and advancing stellar models.
The complexity of the Large Hadron Collider (CERN/LHC/GridPP)
2008 has been the year for particle accelerator physics. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the biggest physics experiment ever built, primarily to search for the elusive Higgs boson (the “force carrier” of the Higgs field that is theorized to permeate through the entire Universe, giving matter its mass), is as famous as it is infamous.
Early in the year, months before the 27km-long particle accelerator ring went online to circulate its first protons, the world’s media was abuzz with the possible science that could revolutionize physics as we knew it. However, there’s a flip-side to that coin. There was an increasing opposition to the LHC, culminating in attempted legal action (that ultimately failed), based on the flawed thinking that the LHC could generate dangerous micro black holes, strangelets and a host of other hypothetical particles. This only served to stir up international interest in what the LHC was actually going to do, and by October 10th, a mix of concern and excitement built up to the grand “switch on”.
Although many would argue the LHC shouldn’t be included in a “Top Ten Scientific Discoveries” (like Time Magazine’s Top Ten), as it hasn’t actually discovered anything yet, the LHC is a huge science and engineering endeavour, where its construction is as ground-breaking as the potential science it will be producing later this year.
Having recently completed its initial four-year tour of duty around the ringed planet, Cassini had its mission extended through September 2010. In August 2009, the Sun will shine directly on Saturn’s equator, illuminating the northern hemisphere. It is for this reason, the new phase of Cassini’s operations has been called the “Cassini Equinox Mission”.
The principal reason for extension is to find answers to some of the most perplexing questions raised during the spacecraft’s flybys of the Saturnian moons, principally Enceladus, the small 500km-diameter natural satellite. Enceladus may only be a tenth of the size of Titan (Saturn’s biggest moon) but it is one of the most intriguing.
“Of all the geologic provinces in the Saturn system that Cassini has explored, none has been more thrilling or carries greater implications than the region at the southernmost portion of Enceladus,” said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 being assembled at Cape Canaveral on Dec. 30th (SpaceX)
In August, the world watched in anticipation as SpaceX made its third attempt at becoming the world’s first commercial space flight company to launch a payload into orbit. Unfortunately, Flight 3 of the SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket became the third Falcon to fail, exploding high in the atmosphere after a stage separation (transient thrust) anomaly. It was a sad day not only for Elon Musk’s dream of providing affordable launch capabilities, but also for the promise of commercial space flight.
But in the true entrepreneurial spirit Musk has become synonymous with, his company turned Flight 3’s loss into a motivation to get it right the fourth time around. Only one month later, the Falcon 1 was readied for Flight 4 from the Kwajalein Atoll launch pad. On September 28th, SpaceX was propelled into the history books as the first ever private space company to design, build and launch a payload (albeit a “dummy” payload) into orbit.
Now SpaceX has proven itself to the world, the future has become very bright for commercial spaceflight. SpaceX not only got into orbit, they did it cheaply and quickly, setting the bar very high for its competitors. They also have a bold vision for the future; building bigger and more powerful rockets (the Falcon 9 for example), launching not only from the South Pacific, but also from the home of rocket launches: Cape Canaveral.
To top it all off, NASA has signed contracts worth $2.5 billion for private launch capabilities over the next decade, with SpaceX receiving a $1.6 billion share. All in all, it has been an outstanding year for SpaceX, and it looks like they might even be ready to supply the International Space Station in 2009, so watch this space.
Hubbles view of the exoplanet Fomalhaut b (NASA/HST)
We’ve known for many years that exoplanets orbit other stars and have observed them indirectly by looking at star “wobble” (due to gravitational effects of a massive exoplanet as it orbits) and exoplanet transits (as the planetary body passes in front of the star, reducing the amount of light received on Earth). This year astronomers went one better, they observed exoplanets directly, imaging the little dots as they orbit their host stars.
As if that wasn’t enough, on November 21st, astronomers using the ESO Very Large Telescope detected an exoplanet in a very compact orbit around Beta Pictoris, 70 light years from Earth.
These stunning glimpses of exoplanets have been made possible by the huge technological advancement in both ground-based and space-based observatory optics. Astronomers are now confident that they can go one step further as telescopes and techniques improve… how about looking for exomoons orbiting these exoplanets? Wow…
In May, the Phoenix Mars Lander captured the world’s attention as it entered the Martian upper atmosphere to begin its “7 minutes of terror“, including a fiery re-entry, fast decent and rocket-powered controlled landing. The robotic lander touched down in the frozen arctic region of the planet to begin its three month campaign with panache. The mission was extended to five months as Phoenix wrestled with the dwindling winter sunlight powering its solar panels and battled against troublesome dust storms.
This mission was also remarkable for the efforts carried out here on Earth by the Phoenix team at NASA and the University of Arizona communicating cutting-edge and up-to-the-minute science via a variety of social platforms. Scientists blogged and Twittered from the moment the mission was launched to the moment Phoenix finally succumbed to a frozen coma in early November (and MarsPhoenix continues to tweet regular data analysis updates).
However, this short mission joined the two rugged Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity soldiering through the elements for the last five years, after repeatedly having their missions extended over four years past their warranty. Add these incredible surface missions to the armada of satellites (NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express), and it becomes obvious that international efforts to study Mars have turned the once mysterious, dusty red globe into one of the most studied planetary bodies of the last decade.
*****
So, Phoenix and the continuing Mars program overwhelmed the popular vote in the Top 10 Science Endeavours of 2008, winning the number one spot convincingly. This was a very tough “Top 10” to compile, but with the help of Universe Today readers, the list became more varied than we could have possibly hoped.
Naturally, many worthy science endeavours didn’t make the cut and here’s the runners up:
The Universe Today’s Top 10 Scientific Endeavours of 2008 highlights some of the huge scientific advances we have made in the last 12 months. 2009 promises to be even bigger, and with the help of the organizers of the International Year of Astronomy, global efforts in space won’t only be recognised, they will be celebrated.
Binary waves from black holes. Image Credit: K. Thorne (Caltech) , T. Carnahan (NASA GSFC)
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If you’re a PlayStation 3 fan, or if you just received one as a holiday gift, you may be able to do more with the system than just gaming. A group of gravity researchers have configured 16 PlayStation 3’s together to create a type of supercomputer that is helping them estimate properties of the gravitational waves produced by the merger of two black holes. The research team from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, calls their configuration the Gravity Grid, and they say the Sony PlayStation 3 has a number of unique features that make it particularly suited for scientific computation. Equally important, the raw computing power per dollar provided by the PS3 is significantly higher than anything else on the market today.
PlayStation 3s have also been used by the Folding@Home project, to harness the PS3’s technology to help study how proteins are formed in the human body and how they sometimes form incorrectly. This helps in research in several diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, and even Mad-Cow disease. Front view of the cluster of PS3's. Credit: GravityGrid
The PS3 uses a powerful new processor called the Cell Broadband Engine to run its highly realistic games, and can connect to the Internet so gamers can download new programs and take each other on.
The PlayStation 3 cluster used by the gravity research team can solve some astrophysical problems, such as ones involving many calculations but low memory usage, equaling the speed of a rented super-computer.
“If we had rented computing time from a supercomputer center it would have cost us about $5,000 to run our [black hole] simulation one time. For this project we ran our simulation several dozens of times to test different parameters and circumstances,” study author Lior Burko told Inside Science News Service.
One of the unique features of the PS3 is that it is an open platform, where different system software can be run on it. It’s special processor has a main CPU (called the PPU) and six special compute engines (called SPUs) available for raw computation. Moreover, each SPU performs vector operations, which implies that they can compute on multiple data, in a single step.
But the low cost is especially attractive to university researchers. The Gravity Grid team received a partial donation from Sony, and are using “stock” PS3s for the cluster, with no hardware modifications and are networked together using inexpensive equipment.
Gravitational waves are “ripples” in space-time that travel at the speed of light. These were theoretically predicted by Einstein’s general relativity, but have never been directly observed. Other research is being done in this area by the newly constructed NSF LIGO laboratory and various other such observatories in Europe and Asia. The ESA and NASA also have a mission planned in the near future – the LISA mission – that will also be attempting to detect these waves. To learn more about these waves and the recent attempts to observe them, please visit the LISA mission website.
2008 has been a landmark year for space science and physics endeavour. We’ve peered deep into the cosmos and fitted new pieces into some of the most intriguing universal puzzles. We’ve explored other planets with technology we wouldn’t have recognised a decade ago. We’ve assembled some of the most complex experiments to test theories of the very small and the very big. 2008 has built strong foundations for the future of the exploration of the Universe in so many ways…
This week, Time Magazine published the top 10 “Scientific Discoveries” of 2008. Technically, as many readers pointed out, a few of the entries are not “discoveries”, they are “achievements”. Although this might have been the case, space exploration and physics dominated, with the #1 slot going to the LHC and #2 slot going to the Phoenix Mars Lander (#4 and #6 went to the Chinese spacewalk and exoplanets respectively). After reading the superb suggestion put forward by Astrofiend (thanks!), it was the push I needed to want to create a Universe Today version of a “Top 10” for 2008 (I’d love to do a top 20, but I have to find some time for Christmas shopping).
This top ten will focus on the last 12 months of Universe Today articles, so take a journey through the year’s events in space science and physics to find your favourite scientific endeavour of 2008. If you can’t find the article, just leave the name of the specific endeavour and we’ll do the rest. Please leave all nominations in the comments box below…
You have one week to get your nominations in (so your deadline is December 19th), and I’ll compile the list of winners hopefully in time for Christmas. The nominations will be considered not only according to popularity, but also chosen by your unbiased Universe Today team…
The US Naval Observatory operates 70 cesium atomic clocks. Credit: USNO
If you ever feel like you need more time, here’s some great news: you’re actually going to get it. On December 31, 2008 a “leap second” will be added to the world’s clocks at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This corresponds to 6:59:59 pm Eastern Standard Time, when the extra second will be inserted at the U.S. Naval Observatory’s Master Clock Facility in Washington, DC. This is the 24th leap second added to UTC, a uniform time-scale kept by atomic clocks around the world, since 1972. Coincidentally, Fraser and Pamela’s most recent episode of Astronomy Cast is about time, so if you want to know more about time and the atomic clocks used to provide precise timekeeping, check it out.
Historically, time was based on the mean rotation of the earth relative to celestial bodies and the second was defined in this reference frame. However, the invention of atomic clocks defined a much more precise “atomic time” scale and a second that is independent of the earth’s rotation. In 1970, an international agreement established two timescales: one based on the rotation of the earth and one based on atomic time.
Atomic clocks do not use radioactivity, but they use the exact frequency of the microwave spectral line emitted by atoms of the element cesium, in particular its isotope of atomic weight 133 (“Cs-133”). The integral of frequency is time, so this frequency, 9,192,631,770 hertz (Hz = cycles/second), and this provides the fundamental unit of time, which are measured by cesium clocks.
The problem is that the earth’s rotation is very gradually slowing down, which necessitates the periodic insertion of a “leap second” into the atomic timescale to keep the two within 1 second of each other. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) is the organization which monitors the difference in the two timescales and calls for leap seconds to be inserted or removed when necessary.
Since 1972, leap seconds have been added at intervals varying from six months to seven years, with the last being inserted on December 31, 2005. The U.S. Naval Observatory is charged with the responsibility for the precise determination and dissemination of time for the Department of Defense and maintains its Master Clock. The U.S. Naval Observatory, together with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), determines time for the United States.
Two of the teddy bears imaged in Near Space. Credit: CU Spaceflight
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I don’t think this is what Iran has in mind about launching animals into space, but … you never know. Four teddy bears voyaged to the edge of space on Monday, December 1st via high altitude helium balloon. This was done as an experiment by a student organization at Cambridge University in England, along with a science club and community college. The bears were lifted to 30,085 meters above sea level, and the goal of the experiment was to determine which materials provided the best insulation against the -53 ° C temperatures experienced during the journey. Each of the bears wore a different space suit designed by 11-13 year-olds who were took part in the experiment. But the main goal of the endeavor was to give young students the opportunity to try their hand at a real mission in sending objects into space.
“We want to offer young people the opportunity to get involved in the space industry whilst still at school and show that real-life science is something that is open to everybody” says Iain Waugh, chief aeronautical engineer of student-run Cambridge University Spaceflight.
“High altitude balloon flights are a fantastic way of encouraging interest in science. They are easy to understand, and produce amazing results,” said Daniel Strange, treasurer of CU Spaceflight. Prelaunch of the high altitude balloon. Credit: CU Spaceflight
The payload which carried the bears was designed by CU Spaceflight and contained several cameras, a flight computer, GPS and a radio. During the 2 hour and 9 minute flight, the radio broadcasted the location of the payload to a chase team on the ground. The team predicted the landing site using wind speed data and arrived in time to see the payload and teddy bears drift slowly back down to earth by parachute.
CU Spaceflight is a student-run society aiming to reduce the cost of sub-orbital spaceflight. They have launched several payloads to near space on high-altitude helium balloons and are currently designing a system to launch a rocket from a balloon platform to outer space for under £1000 per launch. They have run several outreach events and are currently holding the UK Space Challenge 2009, as part of the University of Cambridge’s 800th Anniversary. Twenty four teams of science students aged 14-18 are competing to design a scientific experiment that will be taken to near space on a high-altitude helium balloon.
Will butterflies in space grow different to butterflies on Earth? (NASA, editing by Ian O'Neill)
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Space biology experiments have just arrived in the classroom. With a focus on hundreds of K-12 students, a University of Colorado, Boulder payload will be launched on board Space Shuttle Endeavour on November 14th carrying spiders and butterfly larvae. The purpose? To provide an educational research tool for youngsters, helping to develop their interest in biology and space science. The butterfly larvae will be studied over their complete life cycle in space; from larvae to pupae to butterfly to egg. Web-building spiders will be studied to see how their behaviour alters when lacking gravity. Both sets of experiments will then be compared with control subjects on the ground… I wish I had the chance to do this kind of research when in school. I wish I had the chance to do this kind of research now!
“This program is an excellent example of using a national asset like the International Space Station to inspire K-12 students in science, technology, engineering and math,” said BioServe Director Louis Stodieck, principal investigator on the project. BioServe has flown two previous K-12 payloads as part of their CSI program on other shuttle flights to the International Space Station (ISS).
This particular experiment will study the activities and feeding habits of web-building spiders when in space, compared to spiders in the classroom. The hundreds of students from several locations in the US are involved in the project and will learn valuable research techniques along with boosting their interest in the sciences. After all, it isn’t every day you get a chance to carry out cutting-edge research on the world’s most extreme science laboratory!
The second set of experiments will be another space/Earth comparison, but this time a study of the full lifespan of painted lady butterflies. Four-day old pupae will be launched into space and watched via downlink video, still images and data from the ISS. Partners in the project include the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster, CO and the Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Education Outeach.
BioServe is a non-profit, NASA funded organization hoping to include payloads on each of the remaining shuttle flights until retirement. “Between now and then, we are seeking sponsors for our educational payloads to enhance the learning opportunities for the K-12 community in Colorado and around the world,” added BioServe Payload Mission Manager Stefanie Countryman.
This is where the strength of the International Space Station really comes into play. Real science being carried out by schools in the US to boost interest not only in space travel, but biology too. It’s a relief, I was getting a little tired hearing about busted toilets, interesting yet pointless boomerang “experiments”, more tests on sprouting seeds and the general discontent about the ISS being an anticlimax.
Let’s hope BioServe’s projects turn out well and all the students involved are inspired by the opportunities of space travel. Although I can’t help but feel sorry for the confused spiders and butterfly larvae when they realise there’s no “up” any more (I hope they don’t get space sick).
One gigabyte per second? No problem. The LHC computing grid could revolutionize how we handle data over Internet (CERN)
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We already know that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be the biggest, most expensive physics experiment ever carried out by mankind. Colliding relativistic particles at energies previously unimaginable (up to the 14 TeV mark by the end of the decade) will generate millions of particles (known and as yet to be discovered), that need to be tracked and characterized by huge particle detectors. This historic experiment will require a massive data collection and storage effort, re-writing the rules of data handling. Every five seconds, LHC collisions will generate the equivalent of a DVD-worth of data, that’s a data production rate of one gigabyte per second. To put this into perspective, an average household computer with a very good connection may be able to download data at a rate of one or two megabytes per second (if you are very lucky! I get 500 kilobytes/second). So, LHC engineers have designed a new kind of data handling method that can store and distribute petabytes (million-gigabytes) of data to LHC collaborators worldwide (without getting old and grey whilst waiting for a download).
In 1990, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) revolutionized the way in which we live. The previous year, Tim Berners-Lee, a CERN physicist, wrote a proposal for electronic information management. He put forward the idea that information could be transferred easily over the Internet using something called “hypertext.” As time went on Berners-Lee and collaborator Robert Cailliau, a systems engineer also at CERN, pieced together a single information network to help CERN scientists collaborate and share information from their personal computers without having to save it on cumbersome storage devices. Hypertext enabled users to browse and share text via web pages using hyperlinks. Berners-Lee then went on to create a browser-editor and soon realised this new form of communication could be shared by vast numbers of people. By May 1990, the CERN scientists called this new collaborative network the World Wide Web. In fact, CERN was responsible for the world’s first website: http://info.cern.ch/ and an early example of what this site looked like can be found via the World Wide Web Consortium website.
So CERN is no stranger to managing data over the Internet, but the brand new LHC will require special treatment. As highlighted by David Bader, executive director of high performance computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the current bandwidth allowed by the Internet is a huge bottleneck, making other forms of data sharing more desirable. “If I look at the LHC and what it’s doing for the future, the one thing that the Web hasn’t been able to do is manage a phenomenal wealth of data,” he said, meaning that it is easier to save large datasets on terabyte hard drives and then send them in the post to collaborators. Although CERN had addressed the collaborative nature of data sharing on the World Wide Web, the data the LHC will generate will easily overload the small bandwidths currently available.
How the LHC Computing Grid works (CERN/Scientific American)
This is why the LHC Computing Grid was designed. The grid handles vast LHC dataset production in tiers, the first (Tier 0) is located on-site at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. Tier 0 consists of a huge parallel computer network containing 100,000 advanced CPUs that have been set up to immediately store and manage the raw data (1s and 0s of binary code) pumped out by the LHC. It is worth noting at this point, that not all the particle collisions will be detected by the sensors, only a very small fraction can be captured. Although only a comparatively small number of particles may be detected, this still translates into huge output.
Tier 0 manages portions of the data outputted by blasting it through dedicated 10 gigabit-per-second fibre optic lines to 11 Tier 1 sites across North America, Asia and Europe. This allows collaborators such as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to analyse data from the ALICE experiment, comparing results from the LHC lead ion collisions with their own heavy ion collision results.
From the Tier 1 international computers, datasets are packaged and sent to 140 Tier 2 computer networks located at universities, laboratories and private companies around the world. It is at this point that scientists will have access to the datasets to perform the conversion from the raw binary code into usable information about particle energies and trajectories.
The tier system is all well and good, but it wouldn’t work without a highly efficient type of software called “middleware.” When trying to access data, the user may want information that is spread throughout the petabytes of data on different servers in different formats. An open-source middleware platform called Globus will have the huge responsibility to gather the required information seamlessly as if that information is already sitting inside the researcher’s computer.
It is this combination of the tier system, fast connection and ingenious software that could be expanded beyond the LHC project. In a world where everything is becoming “on demand,” this kind of technology could make the Internet transparent to the end user. There would be instant access to everything from data produced by experiments on the other side of the planet, to viewing high definition movies without waiting for the download progress bar. Much like Berners-Lee’s invention of HTML, the LHC Computing Grid may revolutionize how we use the Internet.
On Wednesday August 27th, at 9 p.m. ET/PT in the US, the famed “Mythbusters” on the Discovery Channel will take on one of the biggest myths ever: the belief the Apollo Moon landings were faked. Some folks who lived through the 1960’s never believed the moon landings actually happened, and some how this belief persisted. In 2001 the Fox Channel aired a show “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?” and the belief grew. But now the Mythbusters take on the HB’s (hoax believers) who say they have scientific evidence the moon landings were faked. Adam and Jamie will fight bad science with their usual good science. The results? We’ll have to wait and see until tonight. But here’s a preview:
Puzzled about particle physics? Want to know what the inside of the Large Hadron Collider looks like? Like music, fun and science? Want to know for sure the LHC won’t create a black hole that will swallow the Earth? Find all of the above in a rap song created by Kate McAlpine, 23, who used to work in the press office of CERN, where on September 10, the LHC will be powered up. The song has been a hit on You Tube, and has been downloaded over 400,000 times. Physicists say the science in the song is “spot on” and provides a rhythmic tour of the mysteries of modern physics and the workings of the LHC, while noting that “the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.” Without further ado, here it is:
McAlpine wrote the rap during her 40-minute morning commute to CERN. “Some more academic people are not too happy and they think it kind of cheapens the science and dumbs it down,” she says. “But I think mostly people are excited to have this rap out there. And a lot of people at CERN just think it’s great, so that’s exciting.”
